Moderating LessWrong: A Different Take

I like this a lot. I think my main pre­dic­tion is some­thing like, “this is the kind of at­mo­sphere LW can have, once the gar­den is more firmly es­tab­lished as a gar­den.” Like, I think in the ideal world I would’ve never iden­ti­fied my own set of recom­men­da­tions as be­ing nec­es­sary, and would’ve just thought that what you de­scribe is what LW is, and always was sup­posed to be.

(There’s an im­por­tant dis­tinc­tion be­tween “we fo­cus on truth” and “we fo­cus on pos­i­tive-sum idea gen­er­a­tion,” but I think I would no­tice and care about that differ­ence a lot less if I didn’t think the epistemic qual­ity was un­der threat. i.e. if there was more safety around things to start with, I pre­dict I would have just nod­ded along with your de­scrip­tion as the cor­rect one, elid­ing the sub­tle differ­ence as not re­ally worth sweat­ing over or per­haps not even notic­ing it at all.)

It’s OK to say “I think you’re crit­i­ciz­ing me wrong”, and it’s OK to say “the com­mu­nity norms are that you’re crit­i­ciz­ing them wrong”, but I’m un­com­fortable when this piece says “the com­mu­nity norms are [that is, should be] that you’re crit­i­ciz­ing me wrong”. If you’re go­ing to as­sume the man­tle of neu­tral com­mu­nity ar­biter of norms, even ten­ta­tively, you have to not only be im­par­tial; you have to ap­pear im­par­tial.

I don’t think the man­tle is or should be “neu­tral.” LW is a com­mu­nity with a pur­pose; neu­tral­ity is a death knell; it’s im­por­tant that peo­ple have a strong, prin­ci­pled dis­tinc­tion be­tween “what we do here” and “what we do not do here.”

Like, it’s my sense that there’s too much neu­tral­ity, and as a re­sult too much that is not at all in the spirit of LessWrong is be­ing tol­er­ated, to the detri­ment of the over­all pro­ject.

----------------------------------

The prob­lem with “you are crit­i­ciz­ing me wrong” is that, statis­ti­cally, em­piri­cally, it’s a tool that is used wrong, and shows up in the hands of peo­ple who aren’t act­ing fully in good faith. Like, when the tool is made so­cially available, peo­ple will hide be­hind it in cases where it isn’t true.

But LessWrong is a) about figur­ing out what’s true/​false and right/​wrong, so this is a valuable do­main of prac­tice, and b) is, both in its mis­sion and in the makeup of its mem­ber­ship, less likely to have prob­lems in that do­main.

Ob­vi­ously, “less likely” doesn’t take us any­where near zero. Ob­vi­ously, if we flipped a switch and ev­ery­one felt that “you are crit­i­ciz­ing me wrong” was a valid sen­tence that they were free to say, we’d have a bunch of prob­lems, and no small num­ber of those spe­cific in­stances would turn out to be mo­ti­vated by sta­tus or mon­key poli­tics or bad epistemics or defen­sive­ness.

But that would kick off the dou­ble cruxes, with the right mod­er­a­tion and at­ten­tion to de­tail. Like, once some­body says “you’re crit­i­ciz­ing me ac­cord­ing to val­ues that I think are in­cor­rect,” you’re hav­ing the meta-level con­ver­sa­tion that was al­luded to in the punch bug post (where e.g. Chris­ti­ans and athe­ists have differ­ent stan­dards for whether you can be­lieve things with­out ev­i­dence).

It’s not like those thoughts aren’t hap­pen­ing any­way, un­der the sur­face—peo­ple are dis­miss­ing one an­other left and right as “not get­ting it” or “not act­ing in good faith” or “hav­ing bad epistemics.” The prob­lem is, there’s no path for them to bring that into the con­ver­sa­tion.

I don’t think we get there by just jump­ing in with both feet.

I agree that we don’t get there by just jump­ing in with both feet.

You can’t make the cul­ture bet­ter by just mimick­ing the symp­toms of a good cul­ture, with no gen­er­a­tors be­hind them.

But I think it should ab­solutely be a tar­get of this com­mu­nity, that it does not mat­ter whose mouth the true words or the valid ques­tions are com­ing out of. If a thing is true, or a ques­tion is point­ing at real un­cer­tainty, then any­one should be able to say/​ask it.

It’s fine to have the hy­poth­e­sis, based on rea­son­able pri­ors, that a given per­son say­ing “you’re crit­i­ciz­ing me wrong” is just be­ing defen­sive or what­ever. But it’s not fine to just make that un­sayable and dis­miss them out of hand. Even if 80% of the mar­bles are red, and there­fore red is the safe bet for the next mar­ble to pop out of the bag, some of the mar­bles are ac­tu­ally green.

If a mod­er­a­tor gets em­broiled in a dis­agree­ment where one side is say­ing “You’re crit­i­ciz­ing me wrong” vs “I’m try­ing to crit­i­cize you for X.” Then this can get real awk­ward.

If the crit­i­cism it­self has (po­ten­tially) some truth or val­idity, but the mod­er­a­tor doesn’t ac­knowl­edge any of that and in­stead keeps try­ing to have a con­ver­sa­tion about how the crit­i­cism is wrong/​im­proper by LW’s stan­dards, then the way this looks is:

a) A mod­er­a­tor is try­ing to dodge be­ing crit­i­cized

b) They are us­ing the man­tle of “up­hold­ing LW’s stan­dards” to hide be­hind and dodg­ing dou­ble crux­ing at the ob­ject level

c) They aren’t ac­knowl­edg­ing the over­all situ­a­tion, and so it’s un­clear whether the mod is aware of how this all looks and whether they’re do­ing it on pur­pose, or if they’re feel­ing defen­sive and us­ing prin­ci­ples to (sub­con­sciously) dodge criticism

Here, it is valid to care about more than just whether the mod is tech­ni­cally cor­rect about the crit­i­cism’s wrong­ness! The mod might be cor­rect on the points they’re mak­ing. But they’re also do­ing some­thing weird in the con­ver­sa­tion, where it re­ally seems like they’re try­ing to dodge some­thing. Pos­si­bly sub­con­sciously. And the view­ers are left to won­der whether that’s ac­tu­ally hap­pen­ing or if they’re mis­taken. But it’s awk­ward for a ran­dom viewer to try to “poke the bear” here, given the power differ­en­tial.

Even worse, if some­one does try to “poke the bear” and the mod re­acts by deny­ing any ac­cu­sa­tions of mo­ti­vated rea­son­ing, but con­tin­u­ing to leave the dy­namic un­ac­knowl­edged and then claiming that this is a cul­ture that should be bet­ter than that.

In my head, it is ob­vi­ous why this is all bad for a mod to do. So I didn’t ex­plain quite why it’s bad. I can try if some­one asks.

(My model of Dun­can says that he would have preferred to tap out, but that he didn’t trust any­one else to pick up the flag of the things he cared about, and he per­ceived the cost of no one defend­ing the im­por­tant things was larger than the cost of him be­ing in the po­si­tion of be­ing both the ob­ject of dis­cus­sion and the pur­veyor of stan­dards)

I’m only op­posed to tag­ging out in wor­lds where it seems like liter­ally no one else will hold the line. In wor­lds where there’s a mod team that’s ded­i­cated to firm norms, I’m en­thu­si­as­tic about other peo­ple bench­ing me if it’s rea­son­able to as­sume I’m emo­tion­ally com­pro­mised.

It would look less like you were emo­tion­ally com­pro­mised if you tried to do the dou­ble crux thing in ad­di­tion to point­ing out the norms vi­o­la­tions. E.g., “I think you’re over the line in these ways. [List of ways] But, if you did have some truth to what you’re say­ing, would it be this? [at­tempt at un­der­stand­ing their ar­gu­ment /​ what they are try­ing to pro­tect]”

(Maybe you have done this, and I missed it.)

But if you haven’t done this, why not?

Alter­na­tively, an­other move would be, “I feel ___ about en­gag­ing with your ar­gu­ments be­cause they strike me as re­ally un­char­i­ta­ble to the post. In­stead I would like to just call out what I think are a list of norms you are vi­o­lat­ing, which are im­por­tant to me for want­ing to en­gage with your points.”

^This calls to the fact you are avoid­ing en­gag­ing with the cri­tique on your post. (There are plenty of other ways to do this, I just gave one pos­si­ble ex­am­ple.)

Does that move seem rea­son­able /​ ex­e­cutable?

(I’m notic­ing that if you felt you “should” do these things, it would be an un­rea­son­able pres­sure. I think you are ab­solutely NOT obli­gated to en­gage in these ways. I’m point­ing at these moves be­cause they would cause me, and likely oth­ers, to re­spect you more in the arena of on­line de­bate. I already re­spect you plenty in lots of other are­nas, so. This is like ex­tra?)

There’s an er­ror I per­ceive you as per­sis­tently mak­ing which I don’t think I can de­scribe suc­cinctly (I have a blog­post com­ing up that will at­tempt to delve into it), but, well, I dunno here goes any­way woooo.

I’ve run into what I per­ceive as the same er­ror mode with Oli, Ben­quo, Iald­abaoth from time to time. Ba­si­cally, most of the time that a ra­tio­nal­ist thinks “some­one has to be the only sane per­son in the room” thing, the er­ror mode comes up.

It ties in closely with the thing you said re­cently about “one of is level N, and the other of us is level N − 1, and nei­ther of us can be sure which is which”, and has do with you not notic­ing that was what was go­ing on, and be­ing way more con­fi­dent than was war­ranted that you are the one on level N, and not do­ing any of the con­ver­sa­tional moves that I think are nec­es­sary to ac­count for our col­lec­tive sub­jec­tive un­cer­tainty.

A re­lated bit of ev­i­dence here is the thing where you per­ceived your re­cent mod­er­a­tion post as ad­dress­ing your core cruxes, but it didn’t ac­tu­ally ad­dress any of my cruxes (not 100% sure about other mods), which is ev­i­dence against your abil­ity to pre-emp­tively pass peo­ple’s ITT’s suffi­ciently to do the par­tic­u­lar style of dou­ble­crux­ing that it seems like you’re try­ing to do.

I’ve felt con­sis­tently like you round my crit­i­cisms off to round­ing your points off to some­thing more eas­ily stereo­ty­pable.

Some­times it’s nec­es­sary to be the only sane per­son in the room and speak out and fight the fight no­body else is fight­ing, but at least in room full of ra­tio­nal­ists, if ev­ery­one is dis­agree­ing with you, you don’t get to skip to the part where you say “guys this is just ob­vi­ous didn’t we already agree on this when we en­dorsed the Se­quences?”. It it were ob­vi­ous, lots of peo­ple wouldn’t be dis­agree­ing with you. You need to go through the steps where we ac­tu­ally get on the same page, and maybe you’re ac­tu­ally just wrong about the thing.

This is what I was try­ing to say the last time we had an in-per­son con­ver­sa­tion about this (I have no idea if I did a re­motely good job at ac­tu­ally say­ing it).

[1] con­text: the last thing Dun­can and I said in pri­vate to each other was “sure seems like we should have an in-per­son con­ver­sa­tion about this be­cause do­ing it on­line in pub­lic prob­a­bly won’t end well”, which I still ba­si­cally be­lieve but since the con­ver­sa­tion is es­sen­tially go­ing on in pub­lic *any­way* it felt im­por­tant to say this thing. I still pre­fer talk­ing in per­son or oth­er­wise re­fac­tor­ing the con­ver­sa­tion be­fore go­ing forward

Just as peo­ple in the sec­ond Dragon Army thread spent hun­dreds and hun­dreds of words crit­i­ciz­ing my three para­graphs of snarky oth­er­ing of trolls, but could not be both­ered to spare a sen­tence to de­cry the be­hav­ior I was re­spond­ing to and defend­ing my­self from …

… so, too, are you happy to write a four-hun­dred-word cruxless me­an­der that leaves me no con­crete threads to pull on, about how I’m chas­ing the wrong Po­laris or em­ploy­ing the wrong norms or pri­ori­tiz­ing things badly, and mean­while it’s been nine days and Ben’s overtly li­be­lous mis-sum­ma­riza­tion of me as call­ing for the cre­ation of ghet­tos doesn’t de­serve a SINGLE. PUBLIC. WORD. in re­sponse, from you. It just sits there, hap­pily up­voted into pos­i­tive ter­ri­tory, tac­itly en­dorsed, con­tin­u­ing to be read by peo­ple in its origi­nal con­text, sans mod­er­a­tion.

Where’s the four hun­dred words on that, Ray Arnold?

“I asked Pro­fes­sor Quir­rell why he’d laughed,” the boy said evenly, “af­ter he awarded Hermione those hun­dred points. And Pro­fes­sor Quir­rell said, these aren’t his ex­act words, but it’s pretty much what he said, that he’d found it tremen­dously amus­ing that the great and good Albus Dum­ble­dore had been sit­ting there do­ing noth­ing as this poor in­no­cent girl begged for help, while he had been the one to defend her. And he told me then that by the time good and moral peo­ple were done ty­ing them­selves up in knots, what they usu­ally did was noth­ing; or, if they did act, you could hardly tell them apart from the peo­ple called bad. Whereas he could help in­no­cent girls any time he felt like it, be­cause he wasn’t a good per­son. And that I ought to re­mem­ber that, any time I con­sid­ered grow­ing up to be good.”

Those things are blocked on hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with Ben, not on the amount of time and at­ten­tion available. I don’t think this small es­say traded off in any mean­ingful way against writ­ing things on the thread, both in terms of literal cal­en­dar time, and I also ex­pect they cut into very differ­ent mo­ti­va­tion/​en­ergy buck­ets for Ray (i.e. my guess is that the above es­say was Ray ex­plor­ing into a rel­a­tively low-effort di­rec­tion, whereas re­viv­ing the whole Ben­quo thread is definitely a high-stress and high-effort op­tion, and also prob­a­bly a bad idea an hour be­fore Ray is sched­uled to talk to Ben).

(More thoughts on the meta-level here, but want to think a bit more about those be­fore post­ing)

The point is, Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs. I read Ray as re­quest­ing that I open up to crit­i­cism and con­sider sub­tle points, and mean­while it seems like none of you take it se­ri­ously that hav­ing pub­lic, up­voted li­bel against me stand­ing un­ob­jected-to on LessWrong is an ac­tive and on­go­ing hurt/​threat—that your plat­form is be­ing used to make my life worse.

Like, se­ri­ously? Nine days and not even a sin­gle word in pub­lic re­sponse (in the place where the dam­age is ac­tu­ally oc­cur­ring)? How hard is it to say “I’m go­ing to talk to Ben about this in pri­vate, but for the mo­ment I want to reg­ister that this does not match my un­der­stand­ing of Dun­can’s be­liefs”? That’s not an at­tack on Ben at all.

Eli re­cently re­minded me of the im­por­tance of sum­ma­riz­ing the other per­son’s per­spec­tive be­fore re­spond­ing, so let me start with my cur­rent model of where you are com­ing from. Sadly, my model of Eli only kicked in af­ter I spent an hour writ­ing this com­ment, so my sum­mary of your cur­rent per­spec­tive will not be as in­te­grated into the com­ment over­all as I would like to. But here it goes any­ways:

You ex­pe­rienced mul­ti­ple com­ments by Ben­quo on the link post of the Punch-Buggy post to be clearly vi­o­lat­ing var­i­ous rules of good con­duct.

You think that while the LessWrong mod­er­a­tors have made some com­ments high­light­ing their reser­va­tions about that, their re­sponses so far do definitely not con­sti­tute a proper re­sponse to the vi­o­la­tion in a way that up­holds the stan­dards you think LessWrong should uphold

You are some­what un­cer­tain of whether that is be­cause the mod­er­a­tors do not think those were norm vi­o­la­tions, they think they are norm vi­o­la­tions but do not need to be ur­gently re­sponded to, or whether they think they have suffi­ciently re­sponded to the norm vi­o­la­tions already

You are aware that we have a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion with Ben­quo sched­uled, but do not think this is suffi­cient rea­son to hold off on cre­at­ing com­mon knowl­edge on the rele­vant thread about his com­ments that you per­ceived as clearly norm violating

You are aware that we re­sponded to some of his com­ments, but also think that there are mul­ti­ple open threads that have not been suffi­ciently re­sponded to, and that it is im­por­tant to re­spond to all of them, and that just par­tially re­spond­ing to them is not enough

Ray’s com­ment above seemed bad to you un­der mul­ti­ple in­ter­pre­ta­tions of his mo­ti­va­tions: 1. If Ray is not com­ment­ing on the Ben­quo thread be­cause he is wait­ing for the pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions to re­solve, then com­ment­ing on this thread and crit­i­ciz­ing you is show­ing a clear asym­met­ric prefer­ence of not ex­tend­ing the same cour­tesy of cease-fire to you. 2. If Ray thinks re­spond­ing to this thread is more im­por­tant than re­spond­ing to Ben­quo’s com­ments, then he is clearly mis­taken about the rel­a­tive mag­ni­tude of the norm vi­o­la­tions 3. If Ray is re­spond­ing to this be­cause it is easy, and not re­spond­ing to the Ben­quo thread be­cause it is hard, then that shows a lack of aware­ness of your cur­rent at­ti­tude to­wards this dis­cus­sion, which you’ve made clear mul­ti­ple times by say­ing that you want the Ben­quo thread to re­solve be­fore you think it is time to en­gage with the de­tails of this conversation

Let me know if I mis­rep­re­sented you in any sig­nifi­cant way in the sum­mary above. I wrote the be­low based on that model of yours:

---

After check­ing the com­ments again on the rele­vant thread, it does seem like there is not a com­ment in that par­tic­u­lar place say­ing that we have a chat with Ben sched­uled. It seems cor­rect to me to add that. My epistemic state was that we had writ­ten such a com­ment, and I was sur­prised to find we did not. After notic­ing this, I talked to Ray, who had a spe­cific rea­son for not com­ment­ing (which was that he didn’t want un­nec­es­sar­ily put pres­sure on the out­come of his pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion with Ben, given the already tense cir­cum­stances), which seemed rea­son­able, but I think was over­all the wrong call.

I think it is good policy to do that in gen­eral, and am at least per­son­ally plan­ning to do so in the fu­ture. I do think there are quite a few com­pli­cat­ing fac­tors in play here that make me think the de­ci­sion to not com­ment on all of the com­ments of Ben­quo I saw as prob­le­matic, is a pretty rea­son­able one. We stepped in pretty early in the thread, and said we had var­i­ous is­sues with Ben­quos com­ments. We men­tioned here mul­ti­ple times to you that we would come back to the thread only af­ter we talked to Ben in per­son. In gen­eral it seems like good form to not es­ca­late a thread again af­ter you sched­uled a meet­ing with some­one to dis­cuss the rele­vant thread. I think the com­ment you pro­posed mostly avoids es­ca­lat­ing the thread, though I would not be that sur­prised if it would still end up do­ing so.

I can definitely as­sure you that I have a large and big open loop to re­spond and wrap up the Ben­quo thread, that I am tak­ing the on­go­ing dam­age se­ri­ously, and have spent some­thing like 12 hours over the last week talk­ing to var­i­ous peo­ple about the best way to re­solve this. I would have preferred to wrap it up ear­lier, but it took a while un­til Ben had the time to sched­ule a proper one-on-one con­ver­sa­tion.

There is a gen­eral thing where the higher the stakes of the case are, the longer the in­ves­ti­ga­tion and ne­go­ti­a­tion will take. In this case, the con­flict seemed to be quite mas­sive, in­volv­ing a large num­ber of peo­ple, many of which threat­ened to aban­don LessWrong or take similarly dras­tic ac­tion, based on our de­ci­sions and ac­tions. I ad­vo­cated for tak­ing the time to re­solve this prop­erly, and that the first step to­wards do­ing so would be pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions with the rele­vant par­ties. We sched­uled the con­ver­sa­tion the day af­ter Ben­quo wrote his com­ments, and the con­ver­sa­tion was origi­nally sched­uled two or three days af­ter­wards. How­ever, some­thing ur­gent came up for Ben­quo on the day off, and so we had to de­lay the con­ver­sa­tion for an­other five days.

If I un­der­stand the situ­a­tion cor­rectly Ray talked to you a few days ago and said that he wants to wait un­til he was done talk­ing to Ben­quo be­fore tak­ing fur­ther ac­tion. I mostly see the thing Ray brought up in this thread as a tan­gent off of the main topic that was not of similar im­por­tance as deal­ing with the main thread, but that wasn’t blocked on any­thing out­side of our im­me­di­ate con­trol. As such, I mod­eled your epistemic state as know­ing that things were on hold, and that even­tu­ally the pub­lic record would get a cor­rec­tion as soon as we had the nec­es­sary pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, and did not ex­pect you to per­ceive Ray’s com­ment as defect­ing on that.

Over­all, and I do think this is some­thing that your mod­er­a­tion post made me more aware of, I think that we should aim for a greater cov­er­age of deal­ing with norm vi­o­la­tions on LessWrong (i.e. your idea of “ev­ery com­ment should get checked off by a mod­er­a­tor”). The pri­mary way I want to deal with this is by try­ing to make sure the pub­lic record is *even­tu­ally* set right. I don’t think our cur­rent available mod­er­a­tion re­sources al­low us to re­spond to ev­ery­thing im­me­di­ately, or even com­pa­rably fast, es­pe­cially with the ad­di­tional con­straint that me and Ray are still try­ing to get soft­ware de­vel­op­ment work done on the site, which does not com­bine well with work­ing on mod­er­a­tion (and with Ben Pace cur­rently be­ing out of com­mis­sion for uni­ver­sity stuff). This bal­ance of re­spon­si­bil­ities in­evitably means that some­times it will take a few days for us to have the time to re­spond, and if you com­bine that with the difficul­ties of schedul­ing in-per­son meet­ings, I think nine days is not com­pletely un­rea­son­able.

Just to be clear, we have definitely not dropped the ball on this. I do think we dealt with this situ­a­tion in a way that wasn’t as pub­li­cly trans­par­ent as I would have liked on re­flec­tion, but we did not at any point con­sider this whole thread dealt with, or stopped work­ing on it. In a lower stakes en­vi­ron­ment, with less po­lariza­tion and less ways of mak­ing ev­ery­thing ex­plode hor­ribly, I think we would have re­sponded to the situ­a­tion much quicker, and mostly in line with what you would have wanted us to do.

How­ever, I re­it­er­ate: it does not seem like the nega­tive value of dam­age done in the time while an in­ap­pro­pri­ate com­ment is sit­ting there wholly un­ad­dressed is taken se­ri­ously; the im­plicit model seems to be “ev­ery­one who saw it up­voted and not ob­jected-to will also read and un­der­stand the cor­rected record later, thus re­duc­ing all last­ing dam­age to zero,” and that does not seem at all true to me.

I’m only un­op­posed to tag­ging out in wor­lds where it seems like liter­ally no one else will hold the line. In wor­lds where there’s a mod team that’s ded­i­cated to firm norms, I’m en­thu­si­as­tic about other peo­ple bench­ing me if it’s rea­son­able to as­sume I’m emo­tion­ally com­pro­mised.

I am some­what con­fused here. Did it not seem to you like you could re­cruit help, or that an un­suc­cess­ful at­tempt at re­cruit­ing help would be in­for­ma­tive about what’s right? (That is, I ex­pect it to be much eas­ier for Alice to dis­cuss Bob’s post with Carol, in the hopes that Carol will hold the line for Alice, than for Alice to dis­cuss Bob’s post with Bob, and I think an im­por­tant skill for Alice is de­ter­min­ing when she is emo­tion­ally com­pro­mised such that this ad­di­tional step is war­ranted.)

From my per­spec­tive, given prior ex­pe­rience in 1) the origi­nal DA post, 2) the DA ret­ro­spec­tive, 3) the meta thread that split off of the MTG post, and 4) the long in­ter­ac­tion with Ben on Face­book back in maybe June of last year, I be­lieve I am jus­tified in ex­pect­ing that ~no one else will ex­pend effort on the stan­dards that I think are im­por­tant. Oc­ca­sion­ally you or Qiaochu poke your heads in and offer a mea­sured, mod­er­ate en­dorse­ment, but it’s usu­ally (again, just ac­cord­ing to me) an or­der of mag­ni­tude smaller than the erod­ing forces.

I note that I have heard from more than three peo­ple that they feel con­strained in re­spond­ing for other rea­sons, which makes me ex­pect that the lack of other peo­ple car­ry­ing the flag is not en­tirely ex­plained by me sim­ply be­ing wrong.

I note that I have heard from more than three peo­ple that they feel con­strained in re­spond­ing for other rea­sons, which makes me ex­pect that the lack of other peo­ple car­ry­ing the flag is not en­tirely ex­plained by me sim­ply be­ing wrong.

To be clear, an ex­am­ple of an “at­tempt at re­cruit­ing help” is send­ing a com­ment link to Qiaochu fol­lowed by “I am en­raged by this com­ment, how should I re­spond to it?”. Per­haps Qiaochu says “yeah, X, Y, and Z about this com­ment are bad”, and then you see whether or not Qiaochu will write the thing; per­haps Qiaochu says “hmm, this com­ment seems mixed” and the two of you work through it to­gether; per­haps Qiaochu says “I think this makes a solid point, what about it en­rages you?” and you figure out the core dis­agree­ments in a more friendly en­vi­ron­ment. If there’s an ob­sta­cle of the form “I don’t know how to crit­i­cize point X with­out open­ing up to at­tack /​ jeop­ar­diz­ing a differ­ent im­por­tant thing,” you now have a la­bel of the prob­lem and mul­ti­ple peo­ple to think about how to solve it.

I worry that you’re count­ing im­plicit re­cruit­ment; that is, you see a post that en­rages you, you learn that I also saw that post, you imag­ine that con­sti­tutes an in­ter­ac­tion where you ask for help deal­ing with the post. That’s not the sort of thing I’m imag­in­ing, and I would ex­pect im­plicit re­cruit­ment to be in­suffi­cient, es­pe­cially in situ­a­tions of time pres­sure.

[edit]To be even clearer, the rea­son why this re­sponse is to the quoted sec­tion is be­cause “un­suc­cess­ful at­tempt at re­cruit­ing help” is the ver­sion where Dun­can talks it out with Qiaochu and can’t con­vince Qiaochu that the com­ment is bad, not the ver­sion where Dun­can doesn’t even ask Qiaochu and Qiaochu doesn’t come to his aid.

But LessWrong is a) about figur­ing out what’s true/​false and right/​wrong, so this is a valuable do­main of prac­tice, and b) is, both in its mis­sion and in the makeup of its mem­ber­ship, less likely to have prob­lems in that do­main.

I have come across similar ar­gu­ments for why dis­cussing poli­tics on LW is worth­while, and I didn’t find them con­vinc­ing then. (It is also the case that poli­tics is sort of about figur­ing out what’s true/​false and right/​wrong, and definitely the case that LW is less likely to have prob­lems in that do­main.) In or­der to es­tab­lish that it’s ac­tu­ally worth it, it seems like you need to ac­tu­ally es­ti­mate the value and the cost, and it’s not ob­vi­ous to me that we’re see­ing the same costs. For ex­am­ple, one of the non-ob­vi­ous costs of talk­ing about poli­tics on LW is that you at­tract peo­ple who are rel­a­tively more in­ter­ested in poli­tics than ra­tio­nal­ity, cor­rod­ing the cul­ture even if talk­ing about poli­tics ac­tu­ally lev­eled up the ra­tio­nal­ity of all of the pre­vi­ous users.

It does seem ob­vi­ous to me that de­vel­op­ing the skill to cor­rectly as­sess whether a crit­i­cism is “wrong” is more valuable than de­vel­op­ing the skill to cor­rectly rea­son about poli­ti­cal is­sues, but it’s not ob­vi­ous to me that it’s more valuable than the varied costs to the com­mu­nity if this can always be a live point of dis­cus­sion.

But I think it should ab­solutely be a tar­get of this com­mu­nity, that it does not mat­ter whose mouth the true words or the valid ques­tions are com­ing out of. If a thing is true, or a ques­tion is point­ing at real un­cer­tainty, then any­one should be able to say/​ask it.

(For con­text, Dun­can and I have talked about this some in per­son, but didn’t re­ally finish the con­ver­sa­tion.) I still think this doesn’t en­gage with my point, which is that read­ing sen­tences is only in­di­rectly a func­tion from ut­ter­ance to mean­ing. In or­der to de­ter­mine the mean­ing of a sen­tence, I’m im­plic­itly mod­el­ing the prior prob­a­bil­ity of many differ­ent mean­ings, the like­li­hood of many mean­ing → ut­ter­ance map­pings, and de­ter­min­ing which mean­ings are most plau­si­ble given the ut­ter­ances I read (or didn’t read). And it’s definitely the case that both the prior dis­tri­bu­tion and the like­li­hood dis­tri­bu­tions de­pend on whether the speaker is ‘first party’ or ‘sec­ond party’ or ‘third party’. On a triv­ial level, whether some­one uses the word “I” or “Vaniver” de­pends a lot on whether they’re me or not me, but on a less triv­ial level, while both sen­tences “I am fair” and “Vaniver is fair” are se­man­ti­cally equiv­a­lent (if said by me), what you can in­fer about the world seems very differ­ent de­pend­ing on whether I’m say­ing the first one or a third party is say­ing the sec­ond one.

I hear you as push­ing for a world where you can write “I am fair” sen­tences and have them be eval­u­ated iden­ti­cally to as if I wrote “Dun­can is fair,” and I think that’s un­de­sir­able to the limited ex­tent that it is pos­si­ble.

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I do think that it should be pos­si­ble to write “I am fair” sen­tences, since some­times they are rele­vant to a con­ver­sa­tion and the best way for­ward, but it’s not ob­vi­ous to me that the cur­rent cost to writ­ing such sen­tences is in­cor­rect.

This is _VERY_ difficult to agree on in the ab­stract, with­out real cat­e­go­riza­tion and a strong ap­peal mechanism. Neu­tral­ity is harm­ful in small groups (be­cause it takes a LOT more effort to iden­tify bright lines and deal with the nit­pick­ers), and ab­solutely nec­es­sary in large groups (be­cause the priv­ilege of judge­ment is so eas­ily abused, and be­cause there’s an ex­plicit in­clu­sive­ness goal “this should work for al­most ev­ery­body”).

One thing I think works well for small-but-in­tends-to-be-big: jump in with both feet, but make sure you’re col­lect­ing (and pub­lish­ing) met­rics about when guidelines are fol­lowed vs when judge­ment was ap­plied, and what the out­come was. A well-defined ap­peal mechanism can also lend le­gi­t­i­macy, but that’s one step to­ward the ex­pense of large-group man­age­ment.